


what's in front of you

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, First Time, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 23:59:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6261070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruised bodies curling around each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's in front of you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Persiflage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persiflage/gifts).



Love doesn’t work like this, he thinks. It’s not some magical unguent. You don’t suddenly start feeling human again because the woman you might hopelessly & unexpectedly be in love with is touching you like this. Like the heat of a candle licks cold skin, that’s how Daisy’s touch feels. It’s a black and blue touch, because she presses her bruises hard against Coulson’s sharp edges, to make both of them feel, intensely. She touches the parts of him their enemy got to first. The mending parts. Bones still broken. And the hollowness he’s felt ever since he pressed his hand down on Ward’s chest until he heard the crack. That’s not gone yet, even if the body, the evidence of his crime, finally is.

Daisy with the black and blue around her neck, and the only thing separating her from becoming another victim (and another perpetrator, that was the plan) are her will and the fractures in the bones of her fingers.

He searches her eyes because for a terrible moment it wasn’t Daisy in there and he wants to reassure himself and because he missed her (it was ten seconds and he missed her) and because her eyes were the first thing he remembers of her, alone in a decrepit van in a smelly alleyway but that’s not when he noticed them. It was when she told him Mike Person needed a break. She had been defiant, not-so-secretly scared, all bravado, until then. That’s the first time she looked at Coulson and talked to him like a human.

“Skye,” he remembers. “Daisy,” he breathes out.

She guides his thumb over the bruise on her hip, “Please.”

He watches her mouth open with a wet sound when he caresses her injuries - new pain cleansing the original. It makes sense to Coulson that she would feel this way, because Daisy is always rewriting history, even the history of her own body. There’s an element of jealousy in his love for her, an element of how much it hurts that he can’t be more like her.

Daisy rises and sinks with his breathing, curled around his cock like a second heartbeat, and he’s not sure which one of them was scared the other might not have come back alive. Slow and steady, watching _him_ open his mouth slightly around soundless words every time she sinks. They watch each other for signs that this might help.

It might not.

It doesn’t matter. They almost died. It’s enough that they almost died, that they almost manage to lose each other. It’s enough to make them pay attention this time, stare into each other’s eyes like this was a more tender, sweeter version of what it really is.

He sweeps his tongue over where the monster has bruised her but he always comes back to look at her eyes. He doesn’t want to blink and lose her. He’s let that happen too many times. _He_ has let it happen, no one else.

She is not Absolution. That’s not how love works.

I don’t want to be, she seems to be saying, claws and teeth as well tenderness. Needing him as much as he needs her. That part is absolutely shocking, the way she drinks him in, with a selfishness that is more than the selfishness of youth, its exuberance, and it tastes more like trust when she dips her head and tips his back and pushes her fingers into the curve of his jaw and kisses him open-mouthed, wide-eyed.

She is the one sinking but Coulson is the one who falls.

We don’t need to be each other’s absolution, her eyes seem to tell him. We might just have to be Sanctuary.

Bruised bodies curled around each other like they are trying to draw a map of the damage. Coulson grabs her hips and throws her on her back, Daisy gasping and throwing one leg over his thigh as he starts fucking her fast, pressing his _whole_ body against every painful part of hers.

“Any better?” she asks when it ends.

He shrugs, shoulders naked, shoulders naked and under her hands. “Not really,” he says, testing the freedom around them.

Daisy kisses him over the pillow.

“Yeah me neither.”

He presses two fingertips against the pulsepoint of her wrist.

Black and blue bodies tangled around each other.

“Still hurts?” he asks.

“Bastard took a good swing,” she says, twisting her arm, but not so she can get free of Coulson’s grip. It’s so he can touch the other side, the one where the bruises are fainter. She turns and kisses the hand around her wrist. “It will get better.”

“How do you know?” Coulson asks.

She shrugs, her naked shoulders against his body, her shoulders naked and unfair.

“Just like I knew he couldn’t kill me if I faced him on my own.”

On her own. Alone. Coulson remembers: his bruises are hours older than hers.

He looks into her eyes. He believes her but… love doesn’t work like that.

“No,” she replies. “It doesn’t work like that,” she tells him. She moves her hand across his chest, across the scar over his heart. “It’s just a promise.”

He moves to kiss her.

“Don’t close your eyes,” he tells her.

Daisy nods slightly. _It’s just a promise_.

And even if he doesn’t feel human...

He doesn’t want to lose sight of her ever again.


End file.
